Pray And Prepare; Work Hard And Have Faith

Greetings folks!

Permit me to share what I read during Bible Study this morning.

“God supplied manna to the hungry Israelites during their 40years in the wilderness (Exodus 16:14-31). In the bountiful Promised Land they no longer needed this daily food supply because the land was ready for planting and harvesting. God had miraculously provided food for the Israelites while they were in the wilderness; here he provided food from the land itself. Prayer is not an alternative to preparation, and faith is not a substitute for hard work. God can and does provide miraculously for his people as needed, but he also expects them to use their God-given talents and resources to provide for themselves. If your prayers have gone unanswered, perhaps what you need is within your reach. Pray instead for the wisdom to see it and the energy and motivation to do it.“

Quoted from the Life Application Study Bible (NLT), page 320, based on Joshua 5:11-12.

Many modern Christians, especially the ones in Africa, act as if all you have to do to succeed in life, as a child of God, is to pray, and God will work it all out for you. It is even worst when you hear some men of God preaching along those lines and misleading members of their congregation. But then again, as Christians, we are expected to search the scriptures daily to find out whether or not the sermons of the men of God are true. And if we search the scriptures, we will find passages like the above.

Thus, by all means pray and take your prayer life seriously because without prayer we will be lost. But we must also prepare ourselves for what we pray for. Even with prayer, we must prepare to pray. Someone will probably say how do you prepare to pray. Well, that is for another day but you need to know what you are praying about, you need to purge yourself of sin by asking God for forgiveness, etc. After you have prayed, make sure you work hard. Oh yes, you have to work hard and also have faith that God has already done it. So you cannot say you have faith and not do what is expected of you.